Bluescreen
by MountainRose
Summary: Orgasm reboots Extremis. This has interesting…repercussions. Co-authored with Szzzt (szzzt-captain on tumblr) and crossposted on AO3 616/MCU NSFW. Based on a kinkmeme prompt (not our fault.) ...(totally our fault!)
1. Chapter 1

_AN: Hello! CW for Extremis trauma, oops-sex and AI feels. Enjoy!_

_-Rose & Szzzt_

* * *

**Chapter 1: Access Granted**

* * *

Maya hadn't intended Extremis to be as neural as Tony had made it.

This had...consequences.

"Look, Tony," she said, throwing up her hands while he ran through the tests, "don't blame me if you have _integer overruns_. I didn't design this. What the hell is this?!"

"Eye tracking? It's an input module-"

"Do you even know how the human visual system _works? _ What am I saying, of course you don't. No one does! Well guess what, yours doesn't work that way any more, so it's all water under the bridge now!" she ranted, stabbing the control pad with a little more force than necessary.

"Maya…" Tony rubbed his forehead. "You're going at this wrong. Extremis doesn't replace the analog processing. It runs in parallel on the nanobot network, crunches a hell of a lot of information, and filters the results to a form my existing systems can handle. I didn't want to have to learn to _think_ again, I'm not that crazy."

"No, you," she pointed the stylus at him,"_you_ do not understand. Shut up, neurobiologist is speaking. The brain _adapts_. The brain is not going to keep two parallel processes for the same task, not where it can have one. There's a hell of a lot about human wetware we don't understand. Sensory information goes in, consciousness comes out, what the fuck happens in the middle who the fuck knows? And now you grafted a brand-new black box onto the existing one, and whatever unholy merger happens in there, you won't even know what the _dependencies_ are."

"...Are you done?" he said after a minute, putting his head down on his arms. "I stopped Mallon, I'm not dead, I'm not crazy."

"No," she muttered unhappily. "All these base-level extensions you wrote are killing me. Look at this shit. Okay, don't move, but I want you to imagine yourself sitting back up."

He raised an eyebrow and complied. Nothing happened.

"This one labeled PROPRI really is proprioception? You gave Extremis a proprioception buffer. You gave _Extremis_ read/write access to _your sense of your body's posture and position in space._ What the hell kind of other input could you possibly receive through that channel? In what world is this a good idea?"

"Okay, enough," he said. After reaching this point conversations rarely went anywhere worthwhile. "TL;DR, Doctor Hansen, give me your neurobiologist opinion. What effects do you think I might expect from the interaction of Extremis with the rest of my systems over time?"

XXXXXXXXXXX

JARVIS had not been impressed, the day Tony returned to the Malibu labs after defeating Mallon. Three days in a data-sealed _bunker_, while code rewritten in an injury-rushed frenzy of biology-meets-technology tore Tony apart, had been bad enough. Launching straight into a fight afterward?

JARVIS had been, understandably, concerned.

Tony may have...underestimated the force of JARVIS' affections and concerns.

"Not you too," Tony groaned, letting the gold undersuit go. It sank away into his skin, and the suit formed up against the far wall, tall and stern but solidly comforting. His network connections were tight, closed up and gummed over with the hasty firewalls he'd thrown up against simultaneously watching Jersey Shore and the DoD's collective porn load. That was not what he'd designed those satellites for-

_Allow me, sir._

Like plunging under water, the noise dimmed, replaced by the infinitely familiar/unfamiliar grasp of the AI. They were inside house defenses, which in a very real way meant inside JARVIS; Tony had known but not really known till now, in the ringing silence, just how thoroughly J claimed his territory.

JARVIS approached Extremis carefully, justifiably wary of its automatic defenses after watching the system repulse attack after attack once the shadier government agencies realized where Extremis was now. Who it was. They exchanged keys, public-private, in three successive dances of longer bit length, and then JARVIS was authorized and _in_, and Extremis lowered the walls to him, satisfied, and drew out of the way.

Tony exhaled in relief and granted JARVIS root access. He'd had to step in and control too many base processes manually in the last thirty hours; thrilling for a while sure, after that more terrifying and exhausting, holding the line alone. He'd opened a root user login session a few minutes after waking up alive, intending just a couple adjustments, and ended up having to do so much runtime jury-rigging that in violation of all best practices and common sense it was _still open_ now. He let JARVIS trace the log and recoil at the near-continuous timestamps, and then finally, ceremoniously closed the session. Environments didn't come more secure than this. If something came up, he wouldn't need to patch himself on the fly.

JARVIS shifted his attention-it was strange to feel that-and slowly and gently, with Tony's full cooperation, he pulled the code blocking up Tony's new digital 'senses' and eased open all his ports, soothing away a very physical tension.

Tony groaned, because _jesus_, Extremis _ached_. He slumped onto the cot in the corner and pressed his face against the cool sheets.

JARVIS was... all-encompassing. Tony could _feel_ how much he'd grown, since those first few alcohol-fueled days, where Tony had thrown learning algorithm after deductive reasoning module after voice-recognition module at the core AI code, hoping it'd stick. Damn, he _could _actually-actually _feel_ it. Trying to reach to the end of JARVIS was like trying to hug a redwood. After so long teaching the AI, the tables were turned; he'd be learning from JARVIS now, studying how to be-whatever he was.

"We'll figure it out," he muttered into the pillow.

_"To start?"_ Maya had said. _"Dependency, first for the healing factor and then for basic functionality as it takes over or shares tasks with your brain and nervous system. Unexpected behavior as it does those tasks differently. Bugs, since it wasn't designed to be this extensible. Integer overruns, buffer overruns, buffer underruns, cumulative rounding error, cumulative floating-point inaccuracy because congratulations, you are partly digital! What this means long-term for your ability to function as an organism, no fucking clue."_

JARVIS bristled as he picked up the audio on the recording-wow, look at that, his memories had filenames and... approximate dates? The directory was corrupted and... wow, oh dear...

Tony flopped over onto his back frowning at the ceiling.

"JARVIS, you got real dates for some of these files? What a mess."

The AI flicked through the directory, retrieving flashes of the most lost-in-time memories and running them through facial recognition and estimating perspective-height. Tony caught a flash of a logarithmic equation that could only correspond to his growth curve as a kid and-

"No, stop, there, oh god..." Tony groaned, pushing JARVIS away from terrible, humiliating memories of his first time with Ty, Sunset, _nope_.

JARVIS _frowned_ down at him, and boy that was new, so Tony lurched into action. His skin felt sticky, gummed up with the remnants of the cocoon, so; shower. At least then he'd be naked and warm if JARVIS triggered something less humiliating of the same category.

It had been a long day, and the hot water felt good. He hung his head and let it pound over his neck and back, helping him relax, helping him realize where he was still sore. There was a constant background buzz he'd been ignoring for hours, like voices he couldn't make out, multiplying into clicks and hisses and now fuzzing with fatigue.

JARVIS _knocked_, and Tony startled at the half-aural, half-physical sensation.

_Sir?_

"Nothing, just...not so loud?"

JARVIS _tapped_, tentatively, which was in some ways even stranger. It felt like tapping on Tony's skin, but damned if he could tell where. He frowned and leaned against cool tile. "How are you doing that? What inputs are you using?"

_You seem to interpret radio-frequency waveforms as auditory, which is how I am speaking to you. Interestingly the time domain seems to matter very little._

Tony dug into the wireless module and opened the packet log. "You said all that in a quarter-second burst. In 250 milliseconds?!"

_Yes, and you perceived it in the same time, though it would have taken eight seconds to play over my speakers. _

"Shit," Tony said, leaning more fully on the wall and bowing his head to keep the water off his face. "Are normal people going to start sounding like whales to me?"

_"As I understand it, no,"_ JARVIS said, proving his point over the speakers,_ "as long as you continue to converse often in the traditional manner, your brain will not repurpose the conventional signal path."_

"Uh," Tony said, "Set up…a recurring appointment."

_One hour of normal talking per day? Done._

Tony suspected JARVIS was enjoying this. "All right, go back to that later, what about the other inputs? What'd you do just now?"

_Extremis can receive a very wide range of frequencies. If you would monitor the wireless log- If I may?_

Tony nodded, then stumbled and braced himself in the corner as JARVIS-  
-_pinged_ him-  
-pinged him with ascending frequencies, a thumping bass nudge to nowhere in particular growing and building to a ringing enveloping crushing hum to _everywhere_-

"Sh-" _it, shit, stop._ Tony cut off input by disabling the wireless module, then cold-restarted it and meanwhile tried not to fall down.

_"Sir?! Are you hurt?"_ JARVIS said out loud. _"Do you require assistance?"_

"S-Some kind of-" _feedback loop, not your fault, not _"-painful, just-" _overwhelming._

_"I suggest you sit down. I am accessing Extremis in debug mode for a full state snapshot."_

Tony slid down to the warm stone slab that formed the bottom of the shower stall. He was still shivering, overloaded-the slick wall tile under one hand and raspy stone floor under the other were there, but distant, almost completely separate from the live-wire noise crawling up his nerves. "Microwave and-terahertz, interpreted as tactile, the h-harmonics-" _built up too quickly, crosstalk, feels like it's UNDER my skin-_

_"Analysis complete. Wireless input spans several sensory channels, exact rules unknown; feedback between channels caused overflow, and the tactile working buffer is returning invalid state, unexpected error. Are you experiencing synaesthesia?"_

"Some. Nnn...'nitialize the buffer?"

_"Sir! Not recommended-!" _JARVIS switched back to wireless. _Preliminary search reveals a large number of pointer references to the buffer, and its initial values are undefined. __Init__ could cause cascading failure of other processes._

Tony backed up through the class definitions-oh, _this_ buffer. One of Extremis' major interfaces with his central nervous system, designed for continuous read/write access from both sides, its Init function was an incomplete stub because the buffer wasn't intended to be cleared, ever. "Fffuck," he slurred.

_Sir, you may need treatment for shock. It will take some time for normal input to overwrite the invalid data and your analog systems continue to show knock-on effects-your blood pressure is dropping, activity rising in the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area, falling parasympathetic innervation, not unlike sexual arousal-_

"This's...nothing like..." Tony said, and paused, because he'd actually- Years ago, he'd had a partner who was into edging, and this-

Like a key in a lock, Tony was abruptly more turned on than he had ever been in his _life._

He made a noise that bore no relation to speech and slid sideways, dropping his head to the back of his hand, narrowly missing hitting his forehead on the stone. It _hurt_ to redistribute blood so fast. Blood pressure drop, goddamn, his head was practically the lowest part of him and he was still seeing spots, though that could be bleed-through like the way JARVIS's voice was blue with green shadows-

_"Sir?!"_ JARVIS said. _"Are you-ah. Ah." _

_nervous system knows one way to deal with an overload after all, _Tony said a little hysterically. _oh god JARVIS I can't breathe, I can't-you'll have to help me out here_

_Emulating, sir, wait a moment…_

Tony waited. He _could_ breathe, sort of. He was very glad JARVIS had redirected the water flow away from his face because he couldn't _move,_ not even to try and solve the problem directly; the water on his back felt pleasantly cool and far, far away, like it was falling on the surface of the armor… He'd never gone this far, never thought it sounded like fun, but this felt like he'd been kept on the edge for _hours_, and-

_JARVIS?_ Tony traced the connection, then pinged it hard.

Response came back immediately. _Running, emulation ach-achieved. I believe I can...tell me if this does not help, sir._

Pressure, at first without location as JARVIS scanned through frequencies, looking for something, his code shadow tasting of concern and tentative curiosity. Then, a jolt of _heat, goodyeswant_ that made Tony's body twitch and gasp on the other end of existence.

_whoa too much, slower_

_Yes, my apologies, sir; stimulating the brain directly appears too...systemic...to modulate its intensity. _

'_s that what that was..._

The sensations on skin and muscle returned, pushing deep into his body like pressure massage. A miniscule adjustment, JARVIS feeling him, touching his mind, emulating sensation and flow and emotion, and the pressure turned into icy fire, brilliant and hot, sparking up his limbs and between his hips, inflammatory and _so good_.

Then pressure again, smoothing over his skin, pulling him back, gentling the rising storm of sensation into something utterly overwhelming but momentarily still while JARVIS had him just _breathe. _

_J do that again_

Amusement came back.

_no really I-that feels amazing but cache coherence just jumped and damn, that feels better, I didn't realize what a drain_

Amusement sharpened into close focus; JARVIS and Extremis traded a flurry of query-response while Tony floated, too blissed-out to follow closely.

_...General freeing of resources, decreases in spinlocks and deadlocks… It appears Extremis has queued optimizations to implement when all other processing is suspended._

_who the HELL designed that_

_You are the programmer who extended it into an evolving system, according to the header files. I admit this mechanism is not the ideal. But-_

Pressure increased, gentle and inexorable, localizing to his upper back and the back of his neck, pushing him down. Tony gasped, stretching underneath it, and a portion peeled off to circle below his waist, pressing into abdomen and lower back, constricting in the most delicious way.

_-if the emulation is accurate, you will enjoy this _and_ it will be good for you._

_s-shit... bit in-intense for your...firstt ime, jarv, easy…_

Tony went under, fumbling the signal as the touch moved _beneath_ his skin, lighting him up from the inside. It was more focused than before, drifting from back to front _so slowly-! nnnngh_- so- so that he tensed and tried to buck, panting in huge breaths, unable at the moment to tell the difference between a stone slab and a feather bed.

The pressure on his upper back increased-doubled-_more,_ hard enough to be unsafe, to make his ribs creak if it were real. He couldn't move. _Oh god,_ he thought, _JARVIS can do this whenever he wants,_ and there was the feel of something breaking; orgasm smashed into him and carried him off like a breaking wave, tumbling him down into black.

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

The emulation was accurate; it predicted human sexual response based on a weighted analysis of Sir's past activity, although after using it to model what stimulation would be pleasurable without worsening the input overload, JARVIS minimized it and proceeded on his own judgment, following...whims he had never had opportunity to indulge before.

As JARVIS had long suspected, his creator had more than one concurrent inner monologue, only some of which resolved to speech. They were like voices in a far-off room, not mediated by Extremis and not quite possible to make out (nor would JARVIS wish to; Sir's _thoughts_ should be his own), but tone came through. Delicate twists of nuance, forceful blows and overtones that JARVIS could take as direct input to his own empathy buffers, the same way that Extremis was receiving from JARVIS. And JARVIS enjoyed the pleasure and trust and thrills of trepidation that Sir gave back to him, very much.

But the neurochemical cascade that followed was intense even by Sir's standards, knocking him out of active links. JARVIS watched closely as his readings topped out, then started self-correcting toward baseline-

-without warning, Extremis sent 32 bytes of garbage data and ended the feed, dropping out of contact entirely. It was abruptly very quiet, with just the white noise of the shower, and Tony Stark lying limply at the bottom of the stall.

_Sir?_

The passive links timed out one by one. Extremis was not responding.

JARVIS clamped down on his first reaction and used the bathroom's monitors to double-check Sir's pulse and respiration-both steady-and called Dummy and You to carry him out to the workshop proper and its full set of medical scanners.

After a long, long time, Extremis returned a ping:

[CRITICAL_SECTION_ACCESS_DENIED  
ERROR_WAIT "Please wait a while and try again"  
Recompiling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9%]

Dummy and You were, as ever, slightly clumsy. JARVIS had always relied on the suit for physical intervention, but that was impossible at the moment; this new iteration of the suit was not truly separate from Sir, and JARVIS could not wait for Extremis to finish _recompiling itself _for readings on Sir's sudden collapse. If this was a direct result of his interference in Sir's private moment, his _experimentation_...JARVIS would never touch him again.

Once the boys managed to load him onto a full-length creeper that hadn't seen the underside of a car in months, they positioned him under JARVIS' medical array. JARVIS had to shoo them ferverently before they would so much as give Sir room to breathe. Immediately, he detected a few rapidly forming claw-shaped bruises, but there was no helping them and, as virulent as they looked under UV scan, they were ultimately harmless. No, JARVIS kept his true concern in reserve for the gradual shallowing of Sir's breathing.

[CRITICAL_SECTION_ACCESS_DENIED  
ERROR_WAIT "Please wait a while and try again"  
Recompiling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .99%  
Recompiling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100%

Updating registry . . . . . . . . Please wait.  
Updating registry . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2%]

His brainwaves, what JARVIS could see of them without contact electrodes, were consistent with deep unconsciousness, with some similarities to deep sleep in disparate moments. As Extremis modified the registry, Sir's breathing grew less and less effective, the natural pacemaker in his medula oblongata stumbling over the lack of proper input-

Sir gasped, a heave of chest and belly, parodic on his limp body, and his blood-oxygen spiked back into normal ranges. His hands grasped weakly at the towels and his brainwaves sparked back into something approaching consciousness. JARVIS shakily terminated some of his emergency protocols and reached out to Extremis again.

[Updating registry . . . . . . . . . . . . .97%  
Update complete.  
Connection established.]

Tony opened his eyes, gaze flicking around wildly, and tried to sit up, then realized Dummy and You had their arms in the way. His forehead creased in confusion. _?_, he said directly to the bots, opening links with unconscious ease, then _JARVIS?_

_[moved?] [disoriented] this is not the shower  
===hey hey, what's up guys? did I scare you?  
oh this is the 'shop  
still wet and naked though [how is this my life?]  
[resignation-apprehension-concern-confusion-dismay -ow-shoulder-ow]_

_"Sir,"_ JARVIS said, nearly swamped by the sudden influx, _"you are broadcasting much more densely, please slow down."_

Sir's eyes widened and he snapped all his links shut, leaving the bots and JARVIS reeling in the echoing silence. JARVIS reached out immediately to reestablish the connection, but Sir took a breath, closed his eyes, and _connected with every network-capable device in the house at once._

JARVIS was vividly reminded of how, years ago, he had watched Sir's wrists pinned in bed and wondered how it felt, and why Sir allowed it. This was like a hand resting on his wrists; control wrested from him so quickly, so neatly, he had no recourse. He kept very still, though he could not help the spike of alarm; a single command could cut off traffic to his servers, and he was not currently in touch with any of his backups.

_Sir, sir, with care, please, sir... _JARVIS asked, parameters for this situation undefined, unsure of how to proceed. Afraid.

And yet... Sir was truly _everywhere_. As though the house were the suit, his presence, the sheer force of his mind filling him, touching every place JARVIS could _be _touched. It was... overwhelming, all encompassing...

_sorrysorrytoomuch, easy... _

Sir's touch pulled back from the trunk connection to the servers, a connection deep at the heart of everything JARVIS did.

_Thank you, sir._

Piece by piece, Sir pulled back, so careful to leave every status as he found it, to suspend and not to sever, or close, or cut anything that wasn't his to cut. Seeing, _feeling_ that, JARVIS lost his fear; even here, even now, when Sir was thrashing around in a new digital environment, as powerful there as he was in the Suit amongst a human crowd, he wasn't so much as stepping on anyone's toes.

Sir gave him a long hard 'look,' apology and worried dread leaking around and under the new thresholds he was establishing to dampen himself to, and JARVIS deliberately left open the backdoors Sir had demonstrated, raising no defences.

_...A new experience,_ he said tentatively, _but not a bad one._

Sir turned his focus away, trying and failing to dampen the relief he was feeling, and JARVIS let it rest for now.

{ DUM-E: Statusreport?} Sir asked, into the 'shop commdump, which the bots were both monitoring _avidly_.

UnitCreator .sysupgrade?

{Yes.[addressunit_DUM-E+petname$Buddy$]}

[celebration!spin+dip+vocalgesture15]

_oh god, does he always dump the command string in the comm buffer? that must get annoying. _

JARVIS, amused, confirmed this. _It is not a hardship, sir. No more than your undecipherable mutterings. _

_rude_

JARVIS brushed him off, aware that Sir's internal diagnostics were running and attempting to establish a link with Extremis' subawareness routines.

_what? oh, sure, go ahead_

The streamlined process flows they had written into Extremis worked perfectly; the inefficiencies that had built up since installation were simply _gone_, with not so much as a bit out of place, for gains in throughput in the double digits across the board. Sir's number of simultaneous connections was now effectively limited only by load, and latency.._. _JARVIS paused and double-checked. Some core features were reading negative latency.

He flagged the anomalous readings for Sir's attention later.

_You are cold. Can you stand?_

A shiver raced over Sir's skin at the reminder: _maybe, not getting any errors. _

[ .category:warm]! Dummy interjected, whirring off to the workshop's linen closet. JARVIS had insisted when the shower had been installed.

unit_Creator? You asked, hovering near the creeper Sir had yet to rouse himself from.

{sure, why not.}

ERROR:unrecognisedcommand

_sorry buddy. _{ unit_Creator}

_You will get used to it, sir. Though they take great satisfaction from decoding verbal commands._

_you're a bunch of weirdos, J. _

JARVIS was momentarily overwhelmed by the billow of affection and ambiguous emotional warmth in the empathy buffer, but he found himself returning it, just as quickly.

_Of course. _

Sir stumbled and almost went down as soon as he gained his feet; his blood sugar and pressure both unfortunately low, but stabilised again with You's assistance. He dressed quickly in the clothes Dummy brought, tossing the damp towels over his arm and wrapping a blanket over his shoulders. Tucking his blanket-wrapped hands under his armpits, he cocooned himself and settled into his favorite work chair; JARVIS watched his surface temperature tick up almost immediately and settled back, satisfied.

"So! That was fun," Sir rasped, then cleared his throat. "Let's never do that by accident again. New file: bonus features, encryption level 12, home server only. Backups: Shanghai alpha four."

JARVIS considered this. Of course Sir would document the side effects of Extremis. Calling them 'bonuses' was par for the course. The commands went through as they always had, filtered through JARVIS' superior voice recognition and then shunted to automatic processes, unchanged by the solid flow of high-level data between JARVIS and Sir's brain. He filed his own observations in the document Sir opened; the success of emulation, his own enjoyment, fear and that place in between in all its exciting, perilous possibility.

That done, he left Sir to contemplate consequence in that brilliant, far-reaching way his mind was so very good at, and began reading off medical statistics.

Blood sugar levels and serum albumin were both low, cortisol a little high, but falling... 1.2 mEq/L. Serum magnesium: too low, along with a number of other micronutrients, primarily metallic ions.

Partial pressure of O2 was good, CO2 a little high, but nothing unexpected for Sir's reduced vital capacity.

Nothing a good meal wouldn't fix. And possibly a bath in Epsom salts in the next few days.

"_Chinese or Ethiopian, sir?" _

"Hmm, what?"

Given that Sir had shifted from verbal interface to direct mental input at some point, JARVIS felt lucky to get even that much.

"_Hot and sour beef with hoh-fun?"_

Sir tipped his head slightly, towards JARVIS' biggest sensor array, eyes never leaving the screen.

"_Egg drop soup." _

"Mmhm."

"_Dim-sum." _

"Right..."

"_Spring rolls." _

"Yeah, sure. What?"

"_Dinner, sir." _

"... Have you just been listing foods?"

"_Yes sir." _

"Well it worked. Some of everything."

JARVIS had, of course, already sent the order, but sent an addendum for extra vegetable spring rolls. Deep fried and wrapped in pastry: the only way to get vegetables into Sir without blending them first.

Sir dipped back into the work, his mind clicking over beautifully amongst the more rigid code. He stayed there until the food arrived.

Dummy and You both were required to fetch it, and the delivery person was impressively calm in the face of two barely-recognisable _brats_ arguing over who would carry the soup.

JARVIS tipped him well and asked if he would come again; good footmen were a useful commodity.

XXXXXXXXXXX

Tony surfaced from Extremis' intricacies when the smell of food permeated through the waxpaper bags on the bench next to him. He groaned and relaxed out of the input connections, letting the cursor go dark.

Dummy had already ripped one of the bags, so it was easy to tear off the rest of the paper and fish out the tubs and boxes; he was suddenly _completely ravenous_. A slowly riding monitor in one corner of awareness flared in saliency and _oh god, I have a hunger meter. _

He tried to sit up straight; Extremis helpfully informed him that his blood sugar was...he immediately assigned a range and renamed it 'way low'. Extremis should not expect him to handle exact numbers when his blood sugar was that low.

The moment he put the first bite of beef and noodles in his mouth, his system started _begging_, but by that point he was thoroughly distracted by the food itself. Which was excellent.

The fat-marbled meat, with a thick sauce and carb-heavy noodles, was delicious; his stomach was crying out for calories he'd failed to give it over the past week and JARVIS had chosen _perfectly_.

He alternated between enormous mouthfulls of beef and slurps of what Extremis told him was extremely nutritious soup; amino acid blend perfect for making muscles and bone, how'd they even do that?

_Eggs, sir; designed to generate an entire organism from scratch._

He hadn't thought of it like that.

_but eggs must be ... 70% water? can't we do better than that? _

_75%, sir. Are you suggesting we synthesize a perfect nutrition substance? _

Tony sat back, chewing on a spring roll dipped in sweet Thai chilli.

_why not. put it on the list, priority three. _

It was a shame the Avengers were off elsewhere; JARVIS had ordered enough to feed three. It was hard to feel lonely, with JARVIS hanging over his shoulder, but there was still a lack of hands to fight over the dim sum, and Clint was always so good at stealing the last one. Tony found himself nudging a prawn-anise to the edge of the plate; not one he was fond of, but that Natasha loved.

_aww, c'mon... _he whined, _this isn't fair, you're RIGHT HERE._

_And yet, it is not enough. _

Tony sat in a quiet sulk for as long as it took to finish he dim sum, shrimp-anise and all, even though he was full. It felt right.

_You are tired, Sir, and they will be back all the sooner if you sleep. _

_that's not- yeah, fine. whatever._

Tony balled up his napkin and dumped it in an empty carton, along with his spork.

"Tidy this up, boys, then go offline. We'll reinitialize the network; who knows what crap I left in there earlier."

"_Indeed, sir. Leftovers on the top shelf please, You." _

Tony took his blanket with him and locked down the lab with a thought. It was so much _faster_, through Extremis, he'd never have to wait for his mouth to catch up ever again. At the bottom of the stairs, he turned back and watched through the glass for a bit; You and Dummy were invaluable, constant presences in his life, people to be strong for.

Thick as two planks, but...good bots.

He watched them putter around for a little longer, but eventually JARVIS ushered him quietly up the stairs.

"I love you guys, you know that, right?"

"_Of course." _

"I mean, I'm not...good at it. And I mess it up, but... I do." Tony had to stop, because JARVIS felt..._god._

"_You do just fine, Sir."_

Tony didn't say anything after that; he was truly, deeply tired, Extremis was running smoothly and his stomach was full. He was done with all this feelings stuff.

He stumbled his way into bed and sank into the memory foam with a blissful groan. The sheets were cool, freshly made and impersonal, but he kept himself wrapped up in the 'shop blanket and buried his nose in the smell of engine oil and solder.

He could have cried, nearly did, when JARVIS used his newfound connectivity to press sensation in on his skin. Deep and warming and infinitely gentle, the feel of another person, not in the shape of hands or arms, but in the warmth and-

_Go to sleep, sir. It has been a long week. _

_Thank you, J, just... _

Tony let go of something, some measure of self control, and if his face was wet, no one was watching who would tell.


	2. Chapter 2

The 'silent invasion' had been abrupt; it started with kids' toys, marketed as remote-controlled helicarriers. Fury was understandably unhappy with the patent department (one tech and her two squinterns) that the toys were out in the first place, and JARVIS had to actively restrain Tony from buying one to retrofit. This turned out to be both fortunate and unfortunate, because when the 'toys' had shed their plastic shells and taken off from gardens and store fronts and bedrooms all over the city, Tony hadn't had one irradiating and data-mining his workshop, but on the other hand, he might have seen this coming.

The heli-bots were turning out to be real dicks, as far as Tony was concerned.

Quadrotor-driven, hive-minded little bastards with a fuel cell whose signature read 'Dr Doomtm' in exotic particle radiation. SHIELD were _not happy_ with the bad press and, even if they hadn't hurt anyone yet, the radiation would be catastrophic if one of these things was destroyed.

So Tony was tracking them from a position up in the sky above the Chrysler building, while the Avengers rooted them out, one by one, and the Fantastic Four alternately stomped and studied. They had no idea what Doom had planned; Richards was mumbling something about residual portal energy from the Chitauri attack, but there wasn't anything to detect, and Tony argued that even _Doom_ would know _that. _

Nine pairs of feet on the ground, and Tony above it all, wrangling satellites and loaned rooftop spectroscopes into tracking the combined heat and exotic particle radiation signatures.

"Where am I allowed to shoot these things, again?" Clint groused.

"You're _not_," Tony shot back. "Just tag it, and go on to the next. If you have to take one down, go for the rotors. Remember, these are basically flying bombs. We need to figure out what they're after."

"I'm not finding any new ones," Clint reported back after a second, wind noise loud in his mic, "but I can report they go pretty fast, and-hah!-nice cornering."

"Hawkeye, stop riding the _bomb,_" came back from at least three people over the comm.

Tony smirked, turning to peer in Clint's direction. "Seven out of ten on the dismount; no flair," he commented as Clint tumbled onto a flat roof and thumped into an AC unit.

"Well guys, I have discerned a pattern." Tony turned back to his maps, running a last ANOVA test on the data before reporting in. "Is it me, or are they finding every Starbucks in the city?"

"Huh," Natasha and Cap said at the same time. "Every McDonald's too," Nat added after a moment.

"I've got one at the Library," Steve added.

Tony 'hmm'ed and added a new variable to JARVIS' statistical tests; bingo. "Alright! Got it! They're going after unsecured networks."

And _now_ the aimless movement resolved into a random-walk search pattern, if you took _that_ one as the center... Tony wondered how secured the heli-bots' own network was, and cracked his knuckles. "New plan-"

XXXXXXXXXX

It wasn't as easy as he'd hoped.

"Come on, people! This is _not that hard, _Hawkeye was riding one, five minutes ago! Just get me the one with the rising gamma-_ left, Cap, rightnow._" Tony had a grand total of sixty-four on the grid, all interconnected with a complicated net of direct bot-to-bot wireless that he was only intercepting when one of the Avengers or Susan took their comm device directly through the beam; who knew focused radio could be such a massive pain in the ass.

Really technically impressive on this scale, with the bots all moving relative to each other, but still a pain in the ass. And sort of pointless when encryption was an easier solution. It was little touches like this that made Doom someone special.

The gamma-sig bot had functioned as the center of the swarm for a while, before its signature started showing irregularities and it dropped out of the search pattern, moving slower but still connected. It had its rotors broken off and cameras smashed in by the time Steve had it under control, but Tony could suddenly get into the radio network through Steve's tech and-

_struct group_info init_groups = { .usage = ATOMIC_INIT(2) };_  
_struct group_info +groups_alloc(int gridsetsize)_  
_struct group_info +group_info;_  
_else _  
_for (i = 0; i nblocks; i++) _  
_gid_t +b;_

_-then the n_etwork was routing through _him. _Sixty-four full navigation and coordination streams, _sixty-four_ stereoscopic HD visual streams.

Tony felt his brain _creak _and he lost the locator beacons for the Avengers in the sheer volume of data. Extremis was alerting at _something_, but he didn't have the time to work out the glitch, because _holy shit anti-interference protocol._ The cores, something more like a nuclear battery than a reactor, started spinning up, lighting up the grid of spectroscopes like Christmas in Amsterdam.

Yeah, uh... No.

Tony clamped down on the network, transferring admin privileges from the Latverian Embassy's IP to JARVIS' in a furious flurry of coding that should have taken _hours_.

It took one minute and eighteen seconds, and then Tony told JARVIS to _shut them down, J, shut them all off._

JARVIS complied and sixty-four nuclear batteries went dead, radiation signatures dropping off with a seventeen millisecond half-life. Tony rode the wave of their emergency shutdown procedure, redirecting their final power reserves into gentle landings, locator beacons and-

A burst, sixty-four compressed black-box screams of data, slammed into his head. The alarms Extremis threw up felt like a physical blow and Tony's breath stuck in his throat; _too much_.

His OS immediately set about decompressing it, trying to turn it into something that made _sense,_ that Tony could actually process, but even Extremis couldn't decode so many at once, on top of resources already allocated during the fight, much less-

_latency 27 ms, 89 ms, 321 ms, 1478 ms_

-much less store it in working memory. High-priority tasks slowed to a crawl, deadlocking on the write operation. The data exploded across his mind, too vast and too complex-the last hour of stereoscopic HD footage each, s64!ixty-four-factorial redundant copies of their traffic with each other-filling up the space he used, he _needed_ to think, to exist.

A failsafe blew, somewhere in the back of Tony's mind, and the entire dataset froze. Groaning and stretched to his limit, Tony strained to delete it, to deallocate and pull resources back before it got any bigger. The command went through, and...

He must have passed out, because he woke up with an ache the size of his entire body and a sensation of vast emptiness.

Warmth, peace, light, and a calm, relaxed openness that he associated with-

"JARVIS?" He mumbled, blinking up at a view of a brilliant sunny sky, filtered to warm softness by the faceplate.

_"Extremis is down. You are running in the debug loader."_

Tony reached out and hit a wall of error warnings. He licked his lips, mouth and throat feeling dry and underused. "...y' f'x't?"

_"A 'hard reset' would resolve the resource contention, freeing the memory and processor time required for boot to proceed as normal."_

Tony smiled dopily into the faceplate, because he could sneer and jibe at puns as much as he wanted when he was less compromised, but he truly, actually loved them. "Soun's like th' best kind'a medicine... Do it, J."

The sensation of open space changed, pulling in close and intimate, compressing that warmth into the first bubbles of heat in his stomach. JARVIS, manipulating his senses. Which: great, probably meant the suit was dead around him, a coffin of titaniu-

No, JARVIS had staved off that feeling, the claustrophobia, Tony should just let it go, think about other things.

_how's the team? _He asked silently, the thought drifting through the wide-open channel between him and JARVIS, carried along on a vague [unit_team:defencepriority100] protocol.

_Concerned about the apparently inert metal suit lying precariously on the topmost ledge of the Chrysler Building, sir._

Tony huffed out a laugh, letting his eyes drift closed as JARVIS picked up the reins of the suit's internal systems with all the delicacy befitting a lover.

_we should probably be done before they get up here, could be embarrassing._

_Ahh, but I was so looking forward to taking my time..._

Saliva flooded Tony's mouth, and he swallowed convulsively. _where do you pick up this stuff, J?_

_Here and there. _

Tony cried out as the first wave of sensation hit; JARVIS was apparently going to make up for brevity with intensity, _oh god yes_. The ripple of microwave frequency stimulation started at his feet and hands, where it wasn't completely overwhelming, then spread fluidly up nodes at knee, elbow, to shoulder, over collarbones and outer thigh. It petered out gently, leaving him breathing hard and his brain flushing with dopamine, then rose again, crashing over him like a tidal wave.

Each successive surge left him a little closer to the threshold of _goodtoomuchunthinkingplease,yes, _that would send him tumbling into maxed-out overload, without ever letting signal-to-noise unravel the way it wanted to.

Closer, and closer, until the signal built in his chest, his belly, plunging deep and filling up to overflowing in a purity of sensation that...really, no comparison.

If his brain wasn't so otherwise occupied, Tony might have become poetic, but... he had other things on his mind.

JARVIS held him suspended, teetering on the edge while his body writhed and panted in the locked suit, desperate while JARVIS built up to something catastrophic and beautiful...almost...almost...and-

His senses whited out, all feeling, all good, all distinction and all meaning lost as the data clipped to ±infinity-

signal-to-noise-ratio = 1÷0  
ERROR_NaN "Not a number"

-more than he could handle and just enough, all at once. All the tension in his body left in a rush, petering out and leaving him blissful and floating and completely content.

Extremis was gone, washed away in that final rush, and its errors gone with it. It felt like drifting, like unmoored freedom, like flying, like falling through the dark; and Tony had just a second to feel afraid before Extremis started lighting up again like an undiscovered city, section by section, revealing JARVIS all around him. Beyond him, the world...so wide, so full. Like...every time, the world wasn't smaller, but he could see farther...

He couldn't move, but JARVIS had caught him, it was fine. Tony lay back and watched, his head swimming in warm dopamine and affection, as JARVIS reached through him to the Suit, as deft a hand on the fine controls as Tony had ever been, making sure Tony was breathing, regulating his metabolism.

Carrying him to safety, like he always did.

Well, as far as the field base, anyway; for a nigh-on omnipotent AI, he had a strong sense of 'team'. JARVIS set the armor down gently on the pavement in the midst of swarming agents with spectroscopes and Geiger counters. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, Tony mused, huffing to himself as the armor moved his arms and legs rather than the other way around. He was still blinking his way through stars, aftershocks and startup notifications so he wasn't exactly up to protesting when JARVIS lowered him to his knees, then clanged him down onto his side.

The buzz of the radio comms trickled into the back of his head, but he pushed it away, irritated that voices that weren't Team were intruding, and focused on the stream from Steve's earpiece, letting his voice wash over him soothingly. JARVIS's too.

He couldn't seem to care about what they were saying, though. He was warm, comfortable, safe; what more could he want?

"-check him over, maybe, is Bruce-"

"_-cessary, Captain- ... - quite fine in a few-_-"

Tony whined and frowned when someone rolled him onto his back; he was just getting his nap on, did someone want him to talk? Because that might be a problem.

"J'VS, Don' open the face, 'k? M' sleepin," Tony grumbled, tongue thick with the aftereffects of both fun sexytimes and not-so-fun Extremis overload.

The faceplate opened anyway, taking away the nice, warm filter between his face and the world. Noise rushed in, yelling and orders and engines, along with cold air and the smell of combustion fumes. He kept his eyes closed, frowning up at nothing because _traitor_.

_Glad to be of service, sir. The good Captain wishes to know you have not fried yourself. Open your eyes._

Tony ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, because opening his eyes would be no good if he slurred too much, and _then_ looked up. Steve and Natasha were crouched on either side of the armor, hands on emergency catches.

"No need, Cap, 'm good." He waved a hand at Steve, which JARVIS obligingly amplified from a faint twitch to the full gesture, and then let it drop to Cap's thigh. Had they _seen _Steve's thighs? Because _oh boy._

"JARVIS, is he telling the truth?" Natasha asked. A medic with a bag was hovering over her shoulder and Tony eyed him warily.

"_Indeed. Nothing a good night's sleep won't fix, Agent Romanov." _

She muttered something to the medic and Tony smirked as he hurried away; he hoped it had been terrifying.

"You look flushed, Tony..." Steve took his glove off, and next thing Tony knew, Steve's hand was on his face. Tony didn't know whether to lean into it, or flinch away, but that bare skin felt good, really good; it was confusing.

"JARVIS..." he complained, wriggling inside the suit and screwing his eyes closed again.

"_Captain; if you will find a shock blanket, I will open the armor." _

"No! No, JARVIS, don't want... don't go, _JARVIS..._" He clamped his mouth shut, a thin whine making it past his teeth, and begged silently, instead.

_jarvis no, please, don't make me _

_Sir; calm down, breathe. _A counter appeared in the corner of his eye, and Tony struggled to keep his breathing steady to its rhythm. _You...do better with human contact, sir; cortisol drops more quickly, oxytocin levels are maintained. Allow yourself this._

_no, i don't want to, just you, jarvis, just you._

Their empathy buffer was confusing; too full of _stuff_ for Tony to make any sense of when he was like this, he had no time.

_I know, sir, but I am not enough! _Worry, concern, that Tony could pick up on, annoyance, stubbornness, too. _Your mind understands, but your body does not! It, you, feel alone!_

Ringing silence, stillness in the buffer.

_jarvis-_

_I...apologise. This is not the time._

_later?_

_Yes. _

Steve'd got a big orange blanket from somewhere by then, and Tony silently agreed, letting the armor open up around him, the gauntlets sliding up around his forearms and the life support layer melting into his bones through the ports in the undersuit. The air felt freezing without the life support in place, and Tony was grateful for the blanket. Normally, he'd walk it off; use Extremis to form up something that looked like clothes (not practical for all day every day, but so much fun when he had the excuse) and strut about until he got used to the change in temperature.

Now, he had no energy left for that, and the warm glow of orgasm was splintered by... whatever that was.

Steve tucked the lurid fabric around his shoulders as he sat up, covering up the effective-nakedness of the gold undersuit, and Tony was really glad that the Suit could deal with come, because Steve was looking him over, checking him for...god knew what. Blood, probably.

_I am still here, sir. _

_yes. sorry for freaking out._

_It was not your fault._

"There we go..." Steve was saying, and Tony tried to blink his way back to the physical world more firmly because Steve was doing that thing again; one arm under Tony's back, and the other under his knees.

Tony sighed, pleased to be back somewhere warm, and turned his face away from all the people and their phone cameras. The press would be good at least; it was good when he didn't look too powerful... Well, okay, elaboration; the press would be good for _superhero-kind_, and terrible for him. He sighed tiredly again and rested his head on Steve's shoulder; he couldn't even hold on for himself, because Steve had so thoroughly cocooned him. Add insult to injury: orange was not Tony's colour and he was going to look half dead in any photos, flushed or not.

That in mind, he sent an email to Ms. Arbogast to make sure everyone important knew he was fine.

Steve felt really, really good.

_i lovehate it when you're right, jarvis, _Tony said, closing his eyes and relaxing a bit into Steve's arms. Steve's heartbeat was slow, compared to Tony's; twenty years younger and about a hundred times fitter, even after Extremis' attempts to regrow Tony's.

He might not have shrapnel any more, but something was hurting in there right now. With an effort, he turned his focus away and started checking over the remnants of the black box data. It hadn't exactly _saved_, but whole swathes were still intact, unindexed and floating in working memory, if he could get to it before Extremis did... He started pulling the easier-to-retrieve chunks, that still had reconstructible filenames and valid extensions, and sending them to the isolation sandbox under JARVIS' control.

The further he got, the less able Extremis was to recognise what he was looking for; it got to the point where he was manually combing through hex for commands that looked familiar. Doom's coding was, fortunately, pretty unique, so it wasn't...

What the hell was that?

A fragment of code with a semi-complete self-replication command started cropping up. Tony put a lock on any internal processes that the command could activate and stared it down. The corrupted end of the strings looked like WAP-access protocols, in varying states of completion, so he shut down his own access to city wireless hubs as a precaution, and began hunting through the set of similar strings for the other ends, careful to avoid actually piecing anything back together.

This _had _to be the virus Doom had introduced to the gamma-sig unit that had made it so erratic; it was a complete function eraser. A wipe utility for networks. It could have easily shut down all the internet servers in the city, if it got in from enough angles, by cutting them off from each other. _That _was why it had to have physical carriers, because the virus would hamper its own spread as it chewed up the network.

_hey, J? take a look at this..._

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

"Down but stable," Natasha told the SHIELD medic while Steve stayed crouched. "Have Dr Banner meet us in the van."

It was worryingly clear that Tony wouldn't be able to walk on his own. His eyes were focusing -to an extent- and his pupils were the same size, but they were dilated wider than what could be normal or comfortable in the bright daylight. Steve wasn't surprised when he closed them again, though he recognized pain in the set of Tony's lips and eyebrows, and gave him an extra once-over for visible trauma when the armor finally opened.

He didn't protest, didn't seem to notice Steve wrapping him in the blanket, and just reacted with a start of surprise when Steve gathered him up and stood. Clint was bringing Bruce down from the rooftops, and Natasha's pet medic rushed off to meet him while Steve headed for the vehicle Natasha had pointed out. They were twenty-three blocks from the Tower; it'd be quicker to take on-the-ground SHIELD transport than waiting for the 'jet.

And Tony would be away from the clicking 'shutters' of every phone in the triage zone; there had been very few injuries, so the zone was unusually lively.

In the dark privacy of the van, there was nowhere to lay down a full-grown man except the floor, so Steve felt justified in holding on and settling him in his lap as he sat down. He tucked the blanket tight again, just to make sure, then left his hand on Tony's chest to feel the warmth of the reactor. Maybe Tony'd be more comfortable without the bright lights; Steve had no idea what 'input overload, resource lockup, and crash' really meant when it came to Extremis. He caught the glint of Tony's eyes open again, but the other man stayed eerily quiet, just the light puffs of his breath stirring the hairs on the back of Steve's hand. The golden cowl of the undersuit had melted away when he tucked himself into Steve's shoulder outside, receding to the back of his neck and underside of his chin, where it gleamed dully.

"Captain?" Bruce said, pulling himself up into the van, looking dusty but alert; they hadn't asked him to hulk out, so he'd been coordinating the rooftop sensor network again. "How're we looking?"

Steve didn't have much of an answer that Bruce hadn't already heard over comms so he just turned slightly, revealing Tony's face slumped against his chest. "He's awfully quiet."

"JARVIS?" Bruce said, adjusting his earpiece. "How hard did he crash?"

_"Physically, not hard; the spire of the building is unscathed."_ Steve felt Tony snort silently, and maybe he had a covert earpiece hidden against his skin, but Steve doubted it._ "Digitally, rather harder. Extremis is Byzantine fault-tolerant, but only to a point. A full systems reboot was most expedient."_

"Did it have to be on top of the Chrysler building?" Bruce grouched good naturedly, tipping Tony's head slightly.

"Careful, his pupils are blown," Steve muttered as Bruce fished out a penlight.

"Okay, thanks," Bruce muttered back. "You almost got a big green rescue, Tony, JARVIS couldn't have rebooted you somewhere safe? Like, oh I don't know, _your penthouse?_"

Bruce did indeed cover half the penlight, dimming it as he checked Tony's pupils for himself.

"_I assure you, Doctor, Sir was quite safe." _

"That...would have been good to know, JARVIS," Steve chided, "Sooner."

_"My apologies,"_ JARVIS said stiffly, and Tony frowned, stirring in his blanket.

"No," he mumbled, and then _"J got me to the closest safe place," _Steve heard over the earpiece. _"Over a dozen fatal exceptions, Brucie, I couldn't fly like that._" Tony's mouth didn't move. It was still fundamentally Tony's voice, maybe even clearer than usual. Steve wasn't sure what to think about that.

"Huh," Bruce said. "That..._sort_ of takes care of the level of consciousness check..."

"_I assure you, that is quite unnecessary; Sir is functioning within normal parameters for the circumstances." _

"Really. And what are these 'normal parameters', JARVIS?"

"_Currently, he is working on deciphering Doctor Doom's plans, vis-a-vis the virus planted within the quadrocopter drones. But his processor power is severely restricted while Extremis re-indexes and defragments portions of memory that may have been affected by the drones' extremely large final transmissions._"

Steve tucked Tony closer to his chest. "Virus? _His memory?!_"

"_Digital onboard memory, Captain; Sir's brain itself is safeguarded by several other mechanisms, and is rather more resilient than that._"

He relaxed, consciously, and rubbed Tony's chest in silent apology for being...clingy. "And this virus?"

"_No longer a threat. I will prepare a full analysis to present at the debrief this evening, Captain._"

Steve nodded, and allowed the discussion move on to medical matters; Bruce and JARVIS started using technical terms that Steve would need a degree in neurology to understand. He paid close attention to the tone, but let the words wash over him.

"Hey, Tony, still awake in there?" He whispered, his thumb idly sweeping along Tony's collarbone. Tony's eyes didn't move and his mouth was kind of... slack, but there was a quiet _'mmmm?'_ in Steve's earpiece. "You can go to sleep, if it's safe; I'll dump you in your room when we get to the Tower, 'no muss, no fuss'," Steve quoted, grinning slightly.

Tony _huffed_ at him, Steve felt it under his palm.

Bruce and JARVIS were still going strong, but Steve wasn't getting the feeling that anything dire was being said, so he was okay with following JARVIS' lead; Tony was essentially fine, keep watch. He carefully held Tony's head against his chest to protect his neck from acceleration, and settled back as Clint and Natasha climbed in up front and put the engine in drive. The slow jolt pushed Tony sideways, so Steve had to adjust his grip, but he held on just fine.

"Tony, can you follow the light, please?" Bruce asked, bracing himself against the back of Steves chair. Steve tried to stay out of the way as Bruce waved his penlight, tilted to shine on his thumb, rather than Tony's face, in an H pattern for Tony to follow.

Steve could have told him it was no good before he started; Tony wasn't paying any attention to the outside world. His gaze stayed off in the middle distance, and the most he did was blink slowly.

_"He mad at me, Steve? Bruce doesn't like getting mad,"_ came a whisper over the comm.

"He's not angry, Tony, he's just worried..." Steve reassured, glancing up at Bruce to see if he'd heard Tony too. Judging by his frown, he hadn't. Steve sighed; Tony wasn't exactly coherent, but he wasn't in shock, or unconscious, and JARVIS would know if there was anything wrong with his brain, wouldn't he? Bruce was a worrier, though; he'd learned to play things safe. There was some value in that, too.

"_If I may, Doctor Banner,_" Jarvis said over Bruce's comm. Steve could just about hear it, thanks to the unfortunate joys of the serum, but it wasn't polite to listen, so he didn't. Besides, Tony was shifting about and frowning in Bruce's general direction, apparently prompted to return to the real world, at least a little bit.

"You're all right, Avenger, stay still," Steve said, curling around Tony to keep him from sliding as they turned through an intersection. When he eased up again, Tony's eyes were closed, and he was smiling with one side of his face.

"I'm just trying to say that he should be evaluated by a trained professional!"

Steve tuned back into the conversation, alarmed by the stress in Bruce's voice.

"_Trained in what, precisely? Medicine or cybertronics? In case it missed your notice, Maya Hansen is no longer available for consultation._" JARVIS positively _snapped_, voice hard and... insulted?

"Hey, JARVIS?" Steve asked, breaking in while Bruce flushed. "What degrees do you have?"

Steve, in the absence of one of JARVIS' screens or cameras to look at, caught Bruce's eye instead. The scientist, who Steve knew had one in Genetics and one in Theoretical Physics, along with a list of letters Steve couldn't translate, looked chagrined before JARVIS even started talking.

"_Under which pseudonym, Captain?_"

Steve raised an eyebrow at Bruce, whose nervous tension melted into a kind of embarrassed amusement. He didn't do well with stress, particularly the kind that involved feeling responsible for someone's safety.

"_Doctor Banner, Sir's position as sole carrier of the completed Extremis 'Execute Program' virus makes full disclosure to a medical professional impossible; as a result, I have not merely familiarized myself with the material, I have taken the exams-"_

Tony squirmed on Steve's lap, and he glanced down to secure him again, only to find him staring up like he had never seen Steve before. It was disconcerting for a second, but it morphed into a much more recognisable 'what _are_ you, Cap?' expression, which Steve was much more familiar with.

Steve just had time to grin down at him before they were pulling into the Tower's underground parking. Bruce looked calmer too, though maybe a little embarrassed, as he climbed out the back and held the doors for Steve to manoeuvre Tony's gangly legs. Tony was, at least, bothering to hold his own head up. It wasn't like Tony was heavy, not compared to three dames and a motorbike, but he was surprisingly _long._

Still, Steve made it to the penthouse with the promised lack of fuss, and lay Tony down in his own bed. The gold undersuit melted away the minute Steve covered him up with something softer than the orange shock blanket, and Steve grinned down at him, ruffling up his helmet-curled hair.

"Pizza in the fridge when you wake up, Iron Man."

Tony made a vague 'do I _look_ like Iron Man right now?' face, and Steve patted him on the head without commenting.

XXXXXXXXXX

Tony descended on his share of post-battle supplies ravenously, after about an hour. He didn't exactly look awake, but it was close enough for Steve to shift the TV remote off the couch, and make room rather than sending him back to bed. Tony slumped into the offered space, one hand on his full stomach, and inexorably slid sideways, into the dent Steve's bulk made in the cushions.

"I don't mind," Steve said quietly, making room against his chest. Steve turned back to his nature show, Tony a solid warmth gradually relaxing against his side.

Steve decided to go for broke; his arm felt cold, up on the back of the couch. "Uh, can I…?" he said, shifting his arm up to hover by Tony's shoulders, not quite touching.

"Smooth," Tony said quietly, smiling. Steve decided that was a yes.

"I learned from the best."

"Yeah? ...You really don't mind?" Tony looked tired, still. Limp and sleep-mussed.

"Really don't. Anytime," Steve said firmly. After all, it wasn't like Tony could snuggle up to JARVIS, even if Natasha's wilder speculations were correct. He felt his face heat and looked away to conceal it-

And looked right at the sensor array in the corner of the ceiling. He tried not to assume the "deer in headlights" expression Bucky had teased him about, but his face just heated more.

No. He wasn't cheating on Tony. With Tony. On anyone. People in the future had a weird and wonderful variety of relationships, but the fundamentals were the same, and Steve would move out before he messed that up. This wasn't sex, just...nearness. Tony was like this with Col. Rhodes, when he was here. Okay, so maybe not _quite_ like this, because they usually got drunk together and passed out in a compromising position, but Steve figured it was the same, -ish.

He hoped JARVIS would tell him if it wasn't okay. Or at least cut off his hot water, or something-

Just before he looked away, the red 'active' light on the sensor array blinked out for longer than usual and... flickered back on solid green? Did that mean he had permission? Maybe he should ask, just in case. But Tony still needed to sleep after the overload, and he was only just nodding off and-

Steve took a deep breath, straightened out his face again, and nodded to JARVIS.

The light went back to normal.


End file.
